Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
1317

The Morse code distress signal "SOS" is not an acronym.

The famous code, erroneously read as "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship" was adopted in 1906 at the International Conference on Wireless Communication at Sea, after officials from different countries had suggested and vetoed other ideas for a universal distress signal in Morse code that could be understood by anyone, regardless of the language they spoke.
Popular belief holds that the Titanic was the first ship to send an SOS distress call, but this is untrue; accounts show that it had been used at least two years before the Titanic sunk.

Tuesday

Fact N°
1318

The longest known diary contains over 37 million words.

Although the Guinness World Record people don't have a record for it, the 25-year, 37.5-million word diary of the Reverend Robert W. Shields is likely the wordiest ever. Every day, beginning in 1972 and ending with a stroke he suffered in 1999, Shields spent four hours writing down the minutiae of his life, from going to the bathroom to detailing all his junk mail.
Shields donated the diary to Washington State University on the grounds that no one read it for 50 years. He died in 2007.

Wednesday

Fact N°
1319

In 2000, more Brazilian prisoners left prison by escaping than were legally released.

According to the BBC, that year around 3,500 inmates escaped prisons in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, which the article claims is more than the number who had completed their sentences and were legally released. At notoriously overcrowded Brazilian prisons, escapes and escape attempts are common and are often funded by organized crime figures trying to spring their fellow gang members.
The prisons are so overcrowded that some areas inside the prison are termed "no-go" areas, meaning prison gangs have taken control of the area and guards and officials won't even go near them.

Thursday

Fact N°
1320

Sunglasses were originally developed for the courtroom, not the outdoors.

For many years, dating back before the 1400s, judges in China wore quartz lenses colored by smoke so that no one in the courtroom could try to read their expressions and reactions to evidence since their decision in the trial wasn't made known until the end.
Not until the 1930s were sunglasses truly developed to keep out the glare of the sun, when Bausch & Lomb made such glasses for the U.S. Army Air Corps. In the 1960s, Foster Grant made sunglasses hugely popular by associating them with movie stars.

Friday

Fact N°
1321

Before the 1940s, diamonds had no real association with engagement rings.

1948 was the year that diamond cartel DeBeers began advertising with the slogan "A diamond is forever" but before that, they began to target young, middle-class women waiting at home for their WWII soldier boyfriends. In short, DeBeers saw a huge market and inserted its gemstone into the tradition of engagements.
The 1950s, an era of conformity, helped propagate the association so successfully that not even the non-conformist, counter-culture 1960s -- or any other era since -- could shake it, and today about 70% of engagement rings are diamond.

The New York Times calls it "the most expensive album never made" and likely the most expensive album never released: Chinese Democracy has been talked about, worked on, promised, even partially leaked online, since singer Axl Rose began work on it in 1994.
$13 million for one album is a staggering amount, but especially in the era of MySpace, where bands are becoming famous for tracks and remixes that cost little to produce and nothing at all to market.

Sunday

Fact N°
1323

Almonds get their flavor from cyanide.

Almonds are members of the Prunus genus, which includes peaches, apricots, cherries and hundreds of other species. The huge majority of these species make hydrogen cyanide, typically in leaves and seeds, but they don't make enough to prove dangerous to humans. Almonds are an exception to other Prunus species because we eat the pits of their fruits (or more accurately, drupes) as opposed to the flesh.
The connection to cyanide explains why people who have died of cyanide poisoning emit the scent of bitter almonds, detectable by only a small percentage of the public.